Sophie Harris-Taylor

Sophie Harris-Taylor is a London based fine art photographer. She graduated with an MA and BA (Hons) in Photography at Kingston University. Sophie works exclusively with natural light, which lends her work an unusual softness and depth. Primarily Sophie works in portraiture, as well as commercially in the fashion and music industries, however often this crosses into documentary photography. Her work explores concepts such as vulnerability, familiarity and natural decay focusing in particular on the female form and the nature of femininity. Sophie has been exhibiting since 2006. Today we feature her series titled, Slight Wounds.

Slight Wounds

Slight Wounds channels the paintings of the renaissance. Their statuesque depictions of bodily perfection in the classical female gods have a simplistic purity as well as a romanticised idealism. They show their subjects as almost inhuman – as mythical immortals.

Stylistically and technically Slight Wounds recreates this, from composition and form to light and colour. However the women depicted are not Gods. They are, to use the vernacular, ‘real women’, with their scars, stretches, bruises and cracks there in detail to be seen by all. The detachment of the sitters’ heads and faces emphasises this, removing our capacity for relation or empathy, giving us no option but to scrutinise and find beauty in the body as an object. Somehow this also reveals some essence of their character in a way a portrait would only obscure. This raises them above the human – placing imperfections upon an altar and making gods of the truth.

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